Hi, I need help bad, I installed the from the 3 cd's on the cover of the mag, being careful with the package selection, all seemed to go well until the first boot, the partitioning failed to do a clean job, so I am now left with only this Linux distro and no Win98se, booting from a windows boot disc and getting into dos will not let me format the hard drive, and the Ltd Ed 2005 will only get me as far as the command line screen. Anybody got any tips, I really do need to dump Gates and his over blown junk, but I need to do a complete re-format and a clean install, the box I'm trying to install on is a P2, running @ 233ghz, any hints on Linux commands greatly appreciated cheers Digger

Hi Digger;
I am also a newbie to Linux, and also "thought" the partitioning had gone wrong, and that I had lost my Windows, but this is not the case.

Problem seem to be the the /etc/lilo.conf file (created during the install process) that controls the operation of the bootloader LILO is doing some "sneaky" things: it doesn't delay for a while to let you see the options, and it does not add an option to the menu to select "another" OS eg Windows.

See this URL [url]http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other-formats/html_single/Linux+WinNT.html for a pretty good guide on how to edit this file so that you see some options, and to get it to probably point to existing Windows installation (this last probably is due to possibility you get my problem; a thing called DDO to allow large drives to be used with old BIOS/m'board).

NOTE you need to be logged in as "root" (with the admin password you specified at installation time) to have the right permissions to edit this file.

If the "command line" screen you see has a prompt like "boot:", you have not yet started Linux; need to do so to be able to login as root and do the above edit.

If the command line has something like your username, you are logged in to Linux, so type "su" to get the option to login as "root".

Linux is a whole lot easier if you start one of the GUIs (e.g. KDE, GNOME ?); but I don't know how from the command line...